If you can’t physically locate the find Terastation III, NasNavigator2 will prompt the unit to play a short musical tune so you can scamper around, listening out to find where you’ve put it. Finally, there’s an EXT3 reader on the CD, so you can read the Terastation III’s hard drives if the Nas dies. However, we couldn’t test this feature as it will only read drives connected to a USB port, rather than the internal with Sata drives.
Bittorrent downloads are managed from a browser interface
The firmware supports all the usual file sharing protocols you’d expect from a high end Nas, as well as DLNA and Xbox 360 streaming, Bittorrent downloading and support for 100 simultaneous users. Buffalo has even included SFTP support, something that’s not even native to the all-powerful Synology Nas boxes. SFTP uses SSH RSA encryption to keep data safe from prying eyes when transferred over a network, and requires quite a bit of horsepower to perform the encryption/decryption. In tests, SFTP slowed read and write speeds to 3.09MB/s and 0.94MB/s respectively.
Read speeds are top notch, outclassing many other drives
Buffalo doesn’t advertise it much but, the Terastation III includes a decent dynamic DNS service in a section labelled WebAccess under the Extensions web configuration page. All you have to do is pick a name and password for your Nas and, once you’ve clicked save, you can access your files from www.buffalonas.com. We found the process was much easier than most other Nas boxes, although in the Windows world, Lacie remains king in the gateway DNS area, with its PC application that’ll work through the process for you.
Write speeds were average, perhaps due to juggling four drives
To test real world file transfer speeds, a 901MB file was copied in Windows Explorer across a gigabit router with jumbo frames disabled. With four disks present, the Terastation III can create Raid 0, Raid 5 and Raid 10 arrays, and all modes were evenly matched for speed. The obscure sounding 800MHz Marvell Vault 78100 processor, with 512MB Ram, powers the Nas and ensured excellent read speeds and average write speeds.
Buffalo stance: power consumption tops the charts
Power management appears, at first glance, to be excellent. The hard drives are spun down and a scheduled sleep function lets you turn the Nas off and on again to limit noise and energy consumption. A switch on the back of the Terastation III can be set to manual – in which case the sleep schedule is observed – or automatic. In automatic mode, the sleep timer is ignored and the TeraStation will turn itself on when it sees a computer awake on the network and go to sleep once all network computers have shutdown.
COMMENTS
Is it still flawed?
The TS2's were fundamentally flawed in that they striped their own operating system to the drives. So if a drive failed then you needed to boot back into "safe mode" sans any patches you needed to get it to work on your network. Ive had *nothing* but trouble from our TS2 having corrupted OS following power outages (the drive have never failed) as you cannot get them to work properly on UPS's.
Personally I would go for a dedicated PC with linux software RAID on it (as a previous poster suggested) as they are far more flexible in a small office environment. If you are a home user then spend your money on a far cheaper raidsonic unit.
6.3kg?
Its a NAS for schoolgirls....
The old 7 bay CD jukebox enclosure in which I intend to build my NAS weighs 14kg sans drives....pretty sure its bullet-proof.
What I wanna know....
So, does this latest Buffalo product have the same annoying file name/path length restriction as earlier products?
Spin Alert!
Quote Buffalo:
"Absolutely not, we use software RAID controllers to constantly synchronise and monitor the array when RAID 5 is enabled.
"When configuring RAID 5, either on a server or a dedicated NAS product there is a lengthy synchronisation check that takes place to make sure everything is working correctly, you can even schedule this check to happen on our product every week if you so wish."
What does that actually mean? That they don't use ECC, but that you can check for inconsistent checksums a week after the corruption is irreversible? That's worthy of "Yes, minister"!
Or perhaps what they mean is, they use a hardware RAID controller, so that a RAM error in the memory attached to the network-facing CPU can't affect RAID-5 XOR calculations, but can only corrupt the data sent to and fro on the network without any sign of trouble. That's supposed to be better?
My question stands. Do they use ECC RAM -- for the network-facing CPU and even more critically, for the RAM built in to the RAID controller. No ECC, no warning that what was written into the RAM is not what came out, so one can suffer creeping corruption without any explicit hardware errors.
My own opinion of hardware RAID controllers is very jaundiced. I've had nothing but grief over the years from various Adaptec and 3Ware 4 or 8 disk offerings. Of course, past experience may not generalize to current products. Another nasty FAIL with such beasts -- if (when!) the controller dies, you may find that it is impossible to reconstruct the array by connecting the disks to a new controller (new model because the one you have is obsolete, or even same obsolete model with a new firmware revision). In contrast, with up-to-date Linux software RAID, you just attach the disks to a new motherboard and everything auto-assembles and works. Combine this with the advanced mdraid features like resizing and reshaping, and I'll go for Linux-based software RAID every time.
And don't get me started on fake RAID controllers - pathetic one-function chips that calculate XORs at a small fraction of the speed of the cheapest Athlon you can buy! They might have been a good idea when state-of-the-art was a 100MHz i486. They're snake oil today.
(Enterprise-class hardware RAID and NAS is a different kettle of fish - I'm flaming about NAS boxes that cost a couple of grand tops here.)
@ Cameron, Andy, Steve & Nigel
@ Cameron Colley: the TeraStation III, like most Nas boxes I've tested, doesn't come with any Linux software on the CD (probably something to do with that tiny desktop market share Linux has). Linux file shares are supported via NFS on the TeraStation III though.
@ Andy Turner: Many Nas boxes will do what you want. The Promise NS4600, recently reviewed on the Reg, calls it 'replication' and the TeraStation III calls it a 'distributed file system'.
@ Steven R: FTP is often very quick, but doesn't reflect how most users use a Nas (I think!)
@ Nigel 11: The TeraStation III doesn't have ECC Ram. When asked whether this will increase the likelihood of Raid 5 errors, Buffalo responds:
"Absolutely not, we use software RAID controllers to constantly synchronise and monitor the array when RAID 5 is enabled.
When configuring RAID 5, either on a server or a dedicated NAS product there is a lengthy synchronisation check that takes place to make sure everything is working correctly, you can even schedule this check to happen on our product every week if you so wish."
